A week ago I was in London for a Mother’s Spell project. I had to travel there and stay the weekend to attend a few meetings and this meant I was alone for a whole weekend without my little family. How strange that was! Completely amazing at first but so confusing at the same time. I had no idea what to do with myself. I would start walking and then turn around, change directions and try to make some plans on how to spend my day . I had no idea what to do with my time since there weren’t any of the usual constraints on it. After the first afternoon of walking, thinking and coming up with ideas for Mother’s Spell I started to think about my own family and realized the strongest thing on my mind was “motherhood”. How much mothers do each day and have done for years and years.
It got me thinking of my two grandmothers that are completely amazing and worked so hard all their life. One raised 5 children and the other one 4 with just over a year between each child. They stayed home and worked out of the house as well. They are both so strong and understanding of everything I speak to them about. They give the best advice and when I ask them questions about how they did all they did, they both smile so beautifully and with a distant look in their eye say, ” Johanna, I have no idea I just did what needed to be done”. This is what we are all still doing. Every mother in the whole world. My grandmothers have both fought for women rights through the years by teaching us how to be good human beings and how to make the most out of each moment, loving us and telling stores of how things used to be years ago. Hearing their stories and seeing how so much has changed towards women and mothers makes me want to keep fighting forward. There has been a huge shift already , but of course, there’s always room for improvement. I feel that they are so beautiful and powerful for everything they’ve done.
My own mother is so strong and did so much on her own without a man by her side. Everything she has accomplished was by sheer hard work. I know there are many women out there with men by their sides, but at the end of the day they are the ones who run the household – the woman, a mother.
While in my room that Saturday morning in London I was thinking and trying to jot down all my thoughts on paper. I made a little video onInstagram asking everyone for their own thoughts on motherhood and what it means. I received many beautiful emails and I thank you all so much for them, they were a great help. One email stood out from the rest and somehow it just got me, I could feel this mother’s feelings. I asked her if I could post it here and she said yes.
So here is her letter:
“I have just seen your video on Instagram, in which you talk about motherhood..and I decided to share my little experience.
I have a beautiful boy who will be 1 year old in march, and the only thing I knew for sure in my life was that I wanted to be a mother.
I prepared myself for the role for years (if you can even be prepared for this!!) reading books, babysitting and talking with other mothers, and inside me grown the idea of what kind of mother I will be.
A calm and mindful mama, a mother aware of her role. A kind of education I haven’t experienced in my life, and that is not very common where I live.
I think that in the last 10 years motherhood has throughly changed: unlike our grandmothers or mothers we choose to be mothers, and we can also choose
what kind of mother be, while once mothers were less aware of the result of their actions, and less interested in children education.
Not that they didn’t love their children, ofcorse, but I think they ask them self so little about what to do with children: they just do what their mothers have done with them.
Nowadays we have internet, we have so much informations about motherhood, we read blogs, we get in touch with other cultures.
And that is so good, but also very stressful. We have so many expectations for us and our lives, and sometimes we feel overwhelmed.
And yes, as you say, we have so little credit for our job. Or, at least, our job is payed every day with love, kisses and smiles of our little ones, which is the best pay I could ever ask for.
But society doesn’t exploit motherhood.
Before having my baby I worked full time, but after his birth I felt that I will not continue to work all day.
It would mean to stay away from my boy from 8 in the morning to 18.30 in the evening.
He will spend his whole day with someone else : someone else would see his smiles, someone else will hold him and get him to sleep, and it will be someone else’s face that he will see when he wakes up.
I could not bear this.
I asked for a time reduction (we could not afford to live with just my husband’s income) and they denied it. My boss said that mothers are not good at work, they are always at home because babies are sick, they are not focused anymore on work.
I was at a crossroad: work full time, or quit my job.
I decided to quit.
And nobody, except my husband, were at my side. Every person I talked about thought that I was wrong, that I made a huge mistake and that I will never find a part time job.
Nobody understood my reasons, as simple as they were: I just wanted to stay with my baby. I didn’t give him birth to let him grow without me.
I know that so many mothers do that, and I think that is so very sad.
When I heard your words on Instagram I just thought about this: it is true. The work of a mother is underestimated.
If a woman choose to be a mother and stay with her children is automatically a failed. Our society wants us to be working mothers, perfect mothers and loving partners.
I think that is a big trap.
Society doesn’t understand how important our everyday work is: we are growing the next generation, and if we want them to be better than us we should work on that.
This is what I think, and I’m sorry that I’ve wrote so much, but I think that you can understand what I mean.”
I found out she is also a blogger and you can check her out at :
I hope you can find comfort in her words in case you are in the same position. I believe mothers are the best workers because we handle so much in a short time. We accomplish a lot each day. It is very unfair that if we take some time off work to raise our children that we get penalized and have trouble finding a job later on in life.. Being a mother is a good thing, In fact we need more mothers for the big jobs. I would love to see more mothers as presidents, nothing has stopped us thus far. I hope to see this change in our world. Criticize each other less and push forward. Look up and far – just go there!
Love JM
@Photo, www.mamafedona.com
